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“But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can’t live with what they’ve done.”
The Second Mate reached up and untied the rope himself. He pushed off. Floating free, he said, “We’re the ones at the bottom of the ocean. You helped me see that.”
“To survive in this world, you got to be many times a coward but at least once a hero.” Here he laughed. “At least, that’s what a guy told me one time when I was beating the shit out of him.”
Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.
us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.” Here, Dr. Song took a sip of juice, and the finger he lifted trembled slightly. “But in America, people’s stories change all the time. In America, it is the man who matters. Perhaps they will believe your story and perhaps not, but you, Jun Do, they will believe you.”
Jun Do understood that in communism, you’d threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.
CITIZENS, we bring good news! In your kitchens, in your offices, on your factory floors—wherever you hear this broadcast, turn up the volume!
In the headlights they saw a man running from the zoo with an ostrich egg in his hands. Chasing him up the hill with flashlights were two watchmen. “Do you feel for the man hungry enough to steal?” Commander Ga asked as they drove by. “Or for the men who must hunt him down?” “Isn’t it the bird who suffers?” Sun Moon asked.
Sometimes there was a voice in my head that narrated events as they unfolded, as if it were writing my biography as I was living it, as if the audience for such a life’s story was only me. But I rarely got the chance to put this voice to paper—by the end of the second day, when I got down to the first floor and found myself last in line to bathe in what was now cold, gray water, the voice had vanished.
Inside, the air was warm, humid. A mist hung. As this husband and wife strolled the rows arm in arm, the plants seemed to take notice—their swiveling blossoms followed in our lovers’ wake, as if to drink in the full flavor of Sun Moon’s honor and modesty. The couple stopped, deep in the hothouse, to recumbently enjoy the splendor of North Korea’s leadership. An army of hummingbirds hovered above them, expert pollinators of the state, the buzzing thrum of their wing beats penetrating the souls of our lovers, all the while dazzling them with the iridescent flash of their throats and the way
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Ga thought of how difficult it was to come to see the lies you told yourself, the ones that allowed you to function and move forward. To really do it, you needed someone’s help.
If he had learned anything about the real Commander Ga by living in his clothes and sleeping in his bed, it was the fact that this place had made him. In North Korea, you weren’t born, you were made, and the man that had done the making, he was working late tonight.
It was suddenly so clear, everything. There was no such thing as abandonment, there were only people in impossible positions, people who had a best hope, or maybe only a sole hope. When the graver danger awaited, it wasn’t abandoning, it was saving. He’d been saved, he now saw. A beauty, his mother, a singer. Because of that, a terrible fate awaited—she hadn’t left him behind, she’d saved him from what was ahead.
